Vicente Van GoghValeria MartÍnez serrano

Introduction

Vincent van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853. As a quiet child he showed any interest in art but when he was 16 years old, he began working at the Hague gallery. After several transfers that took him to London and Paris, he lost interest in becoming a professional art dealer and found a job as a missionary. Consequently, van Gogh left the Church and set out to become an artist.

In 1886 van Gogh relocated to Paris and was influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism, and gained experince to artists such as Gauguin, Pissarro, Monet, and Bernard. As a result, he adopted brightness, more vibrant colors in his art and began experimenting with his technique.

People who were influential in his life

Theodorus: Vincent's younger brother who worked as an art dealer and was Vincent's closest friend. Over three fourths of the more than 800 letters Vincent wrote during his life were to Theo.

Johanna Gesina Van Gogh: Theo's wife. Johanna was the first to publish the letters Vincent wrote to Theo after his death.

Cornelia Adriana Vos-Stricker: Vincent's widowed cousin who he fell in love, being so painful by the loss of her husband Cornelia rejected Vincent and returned to Amsterdam.

Dr. Félix Rey: Doctor who treated Van Gogh in Arles after he cut off part of his left ear lobe.

Vincent Van Gogh set himself apart as a Post-Impressionist artist, as he can capture great beauty and can capture the emotion of many pieces.

These are some techniques that he used:

Canvas Preparation: Vincent Van Gogh made a point of carefully preparing his canvas. Van Gogh preferred the canvas at the day, which was tightly woven and made by machines. Van Gogh’s artistic preparation process included the use of chalk, barium sulphate and lead white as canvas fillers. This made it possible for the artist to exemplify his unique painting style.

Paint Colors And Tubes: Vincent Van Gogh had an influential figure to this day, because of his impressive command of color. His use of color evolved thanks to the course of his career, with pictures including, dark tones as olive and raw sienna. Many of these paintings featured miserable miners and peasants, the use of earthly tones was necessary, in order to capture the desperation of these subjects. As he grew more comfortable with his chosen profession, Van Gogh began to experiment more and more with bright colors. He decided to take a much more revolutionary technique by matching colors with emotions.

Impasto: This involves the thick laying down of paint on a particular segment of the canvas. This technique makes brushstrokes more visible and, once the paint has dried, it is added to the paining an extra element of paint. In Van Gogh’s work, the use of impasto had a huge effect on lighting, almost three dimensional surfaces of his paintings depend on the source of light that he used on his paintings.

Perspective Frame: He made a good effort to improve his technique with the help of various guidebooks, but in the end, he came on a perspective frame. It was constructed with the help of a local blacksmith, this frame that looked like a box, allowed Van Gogh to view the scenes he was painting as if he was seeing those scenes from the window. The frame also uses the painting process, allowing Van Gogh to achieve his painting in a far shorter period of time. In a letter developing to his younger brother and art dealer Theo Van Gogh, the artist described his use of the perspective frame in detail.

Starry Night

The night sky painted by van Gogh in the Starry Night painting is painted with whirling clouds, shining stars, and a bright crescent moon. Van Gogh´s sky directs the viewer´s eye around the painting, with spaces between the stars and the curving contours creating a dot to dot effect, as if was been painted by dots. In Starry Night contoured forms are a mean of expression and they are used to capture emotions. Many think that this drawing reflects in the dimness of the night sky the illness that he had to pass through. The village is painted with dark colors and the windows are colored in brightly. Dark snd bright colors are used and reflected on this painting.

The buildings in the centre of the painting are small blocks of yellows, oranges, and greens with a little bit of red to the left of the church, the colors are used to suggest emotion.

Van Gogh had a passion for nighttime, as is evident in the Starry Night painting, where the powerful sky sits above the town. The main light sources that are used, are the bright stars and the crescent moon.

It seems that van Gogh was showing that even with a dark night such as this one it is still possible to see light, with shining stars filling the sky, and a very bright crescent moon, as if shows that there is always light to guide you. It seems that van Gogh was finally being cured of his illness and had essentially found his heaven. He used bold colors in the Starry Night painting.

Van Gogh's mental instability provided the source for the emotional emotions of his surroundings and permeate each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance.

What have I learnt

Van Gogh's unstable personal temperament became synonymous with the romantic image of the tortured artist.

Van Gogh used an impulsive application of paint and symbolic colors to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define many modern movements from Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism.

Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a fusion of style and content that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases. And showed that it starts painting with the background and then the field, also he matched dark and bright colours in his paintings. As he used bold colors.

Van Gogh's mental instability provided the source for the emotional emotions of his surroundings and permeate each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance.